Grasshopper Phone Review

Grasshopper Review Summary:

Grasshopper is best for those looking for a basic, usage based, virtual pbx system without a lot of frills and no long term contracts needed to get discounted pricing. Those looking for a merchant that offers a pay-as-you-go plan.

Grasshopper Pricing

Detailed Features Grasshopper.com

Grasshopper.com was created through an extensive rebranding effort of what used to be called GotVmail. As part of the rebranding, Grasshopper.com came up with a whole new, much more friendly user interface. This really was the major change that took place via the rebranding effort. Previous to that they had made several changes to their plans that made them much more competitive.

What We Like About Grasshopper.com

No Pre-Paid Yearly Plans:

We like the fact that you do not have to commit to a year long pre-paid contract plan to get a low monthly price. Kudos to Grasshopper for this. The other vendors could and should take note of this, and follow suite to truly offer top notch plans to their customers. This is one of our biggest pet peeves with VOIP and cell phone carriers.

Find Me/Follow Me:

Grasshopper offers a really cool feature to allow you to program the days and hours of day you want each phone number tried when using the find me/follow me feature. This offers users allot of flexibility when out of the office.

Additional Incoming Phone Lines:

Grasshopper is only one of a few providers that provide additional incoming phone lines at no additional cost on their Partner and Small Business plans. We believe this is a great move, and all providers should offer this option so that business’s(without additional cost to them) can provide their customers with both a local and toll free method of reaching their them.

Pay-as-you-go Plan

Grasshopper provides a plan where you only pay for the minutes you use, rather than paying for a bank of minutes you may never use.

What We Don’t Like About Grasshopper.com

Unlimited Minutes on all Plans:

Grasshopper now offers unlimited minutes on all plans, except for the “Pay As You Grow” plan which charges 6¢ per minute.

No Outbound Internet Faxing:

This may or may not be a big deal to most people, however we see it more as a “gap” in Grasshopper’s offerings. It is a feature offered by the other top 2 providers in the space, and a direction we feel the market is definitely moving towards. They do offer inbound internet fax, which allows you to receive faxes via your phone system without having to have a dedicated line or fax machine. The faxes can be sent to your email or control center, and printed. However, outbound faxing completes the package and allows you to also send faxes from the system, totally eliminating the need for a fax machine or another online faxing service.

No true ACD Queing:

Again, we doubt this will be a big issue to the Very Small Business/Home Office/Professional or Small Business space, because Grasshopper does provide Hunt group Queing. This is where a call is routed to a group of people and it will “hunt” through the group until it finds a person who answers the call, or if unanswered for a specified period of time is sent to a designated voicemail. ACD Queing on the other hand will allow for different variables like time of day, prioritization of staff, and real time intervention by a supervisor. Grasshopper does offer a custom option to program random “rotational” extension calling, but you have to call customer support to have it set up.

Grasshopper.com Review Summary

If you don’t need true ACD Queuing (which VirtualPBX is the only vendor in this space to provide “true” ACD queuing), and outbound Internet Faxing isn’t a big deal for you, then Grasshopper offers solid plans, without having to commit to a year long contract to get discounted pricing. They also now offer unlimited extensions on all of their plans, and all of their plans come with unlimited minutes which is unique compared to any of their competitors for a similarly priced plan.

If you are an entrepreneur this company is not for you. There whole marketing plan is to help entrepreneurs but don’t fall for the hype. They are a bait and switch company that sets you up on recurring payments without an invoice and charge you blindly without authorization. They think that when you sign up for a phone number they can charge whatever they want without sending you a bill or giving the option to pay bill now. You’ll end up paying more than your own cellphone bill for a simple phone number. I do not recommend using a company like this for your phone numbers. By the way there should be a choice for 0 stars I would have chose that not 1 star. They don’t deserve it!!!!

I am disappointed with the phone service. It seems as if the calls to always go to voice mail even though they ring on my mobile. I have to set up phone to ring 10 or more times to get to answer the call

This a a horrible service. We lost several patients, referals sorces and suffered significant financial damage b/c of their poor service (phone not ringing, fax not going through). My staff phoned every day to ask problem to get fixed and there was no improvement; our case was not even escalated after several complaints on our side. I would stay away from this service!

I love my Grasshopper system. It is very user friendly and with unlimited extensions, I can have all of my employees have their own extension and have more as I grow. The customer services is fantastic and any question I have ever had is answered very quickly.

I recently signed up for Grasshopper and so far so good. Everything seems to be working properly and very easy to use on the back end. The pricing is competitive but on the higher side of the market. I would recommend the service.

Grasshopper seems to have a ton of features and flexibility to set up a small business phone system. I purchased a $24.99/month plan. Unfortunately I was not even able to get past the greeting set up. They offer several options for setting up greetings but each had problems. They only accept MP3 format and not MP4 (used by my iPhone). You can record greetings through your computer and you can dial into their system to make your greeting. I tried both of those options and they both sounded HORRIBLE. Sounded like I was speaking from a million miles away. Attempted this several times without a ‘decent’ recording. The only other option they provide is having their ‘voice studio’ record the message for you for $75 per greeting. WOW! That is 3 months of phone service. I decided to use a different service. It doesn’t do me any good to have the services that they provide if I can’t even get a decent greeting recorded.

I’m so sorry about your experience with Grasshopper, and truly appreciate the feedback. I agree that recording the greetings can be frustrating, and we’re working on a better way to do that. I do want to note, though, that the voice studio is $75 per order – you can have your main greeting and as many extension greetings recorded as you’d like.

I am overall pleased by the functionality of Grasshopper. I have a side business that hosts bus trips to regional casinos. I would recommend getting familiar with the many useful configuration options before putting it live. My current setup is now much improved from my original concept, after incorporating “information only” extensions, and fax on demand service. I also have the ability for callers to talk to me or my answering service for additional questions, or to place an order. Grasshopper prequalify’s my calls, provides prerecorded answers to basic questions, and transfers to real humans, when needed. The savings from fewer calls directly going to an answering service exceeds what I pay for Grasshopper’s $12.00 monthly basic “Pay as you go” service and fees.

Rude tech support. I told the guy that I had been trying to log in and waiting 15 minutes for the password reset email to arrive and it never did (even though the site told me that it was on the way). He said that since I have a username on my account, I can’t login using my email address. I tried that and it worked. But when I told him that the login field literally says “Username / Email” and that it’s confusing and they might want to fix it. He replied, “Great! So everything’s fine then!” He clearly didn’t care, wasn’t going pass along my concern, and just seemed to want to hang up as fast as he could. With the fees and poor admin interface, I’m moving to another service.

I’m so sorry to hear about your experience with Grasshopper and our support team. I’ll definitely take your feedback to our product team – we do truly appreciate it. We can only improve when we get feedback from our customers.

Grasshopper pricing is very misleading. They offer a plan but do not tell you about the fees and surcharges that amount to almost 45% increase in the total cost. Grasshopper collects a 2 cent tax and charges $3.25 to collect it, in addition to Universal Service Fund (USF) charges and other taxes and fees. Grasshopper also lies about the per minute pricing: it is advertised as 6 cents a minute, however, I am being charged 6.1 cents a minute. When I called to question the amount, I was placed on hold for over an 68 minutes and the call was dropped. I called back and the representative was again not able to explain the discrepancy. It is not the dollar amount that I am so concerned with as the fraudulent charges perpetuated by Grasshopper.

I apologize for any confusion cause by our pricing. All of the taxes and fees are displayed when you’re on the last page of signup, before your card is charged. Taxes will vary based on the state your billing address is located in.

As for the 6.1 cents/minute, I actually haven’t heard of that before. If you’re willing, I’d love if you could send me a screenshot of your statements, so I can look into this a little more and figure out where the discrepancy is coming from.

I’m sorry to hear about your experience with us. I’d like to dig into this a little more, if you’re up for it. If you could send an email to social@grasshopper.com, I’ll be able to look into this for you.

They do not deserve any stars.
This company is a ripoff.
I changed my plan to the 12.00 mo plan. They then billed me over $26 per month for 5 months before I realized that they were over billing me. They then said that I had some other crap service that I did not want or use. Then said the would not refund my money, only credit my account. I told them I would not be doing business with a company that pulls this kind of crap on their customers, and to closed my account Immediately.

I was skeptical about this service from the beginning but I went with it because a client of mine used it and I didn’t experience any issues. Well, this past Monday I received an email response from a client saying that he had been trying to reach me. I told him my phone hasn’t rung nor did I receive any voicemails. I went in to check my account and sure enough, he had been trying to call me for about 5 days and had left two voicemail which I knew nothing about. The calls had not been forwarding to my cell. After discovering this, I tried to contact Grasshopper’s support and their phone system was having problems too. I attempting to call around 8-10 times to no avail.

I finally submitted a scathing ticket requesting my service to be terminated. I don’t have time for this kind of foolishness and I am not going to be losing revenue because of it. I turned my Brighthouse phone back on and I am 100% sure I won’t be having any issues with that. And, they gave me a nice little promotion.

No wonder I hadn’t heard about Grasshopper prior to one of my client’s using it. They have a long way to go in establishing a working service. Oh and I still have no idea why their phone system failed for me because my email went unreturned in regards to that inquiry.

I’m so sorry to hear about your experience with us! I’m connecting with our support team and will follow up via email just so we can close the loop on this. This isn’t how we like to handle problems our customers are experiencing.

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